I recently had the opportunity to sit down and chat with Sunil Saxena, the owner of InMotion Hosting. InMotion has been in business since 2001, and has been competing successfully with large, publicly traded companies, despite still being a privately owned company. Sunil shared with me what he see as the reasons for the company’s success, as well as its newest offerings and plans for the future.
HostAdvice: You are a unique hosting company in the industry. Despite your size (Ranked 20 in the US according to our research) you are privately owned. How does this help/challenge you when competing with Giants like EIG or Godaddy’s owned Media Temple?
Several years ago, when the hosting industry was still in its infancy, it was hard competing against conglomerates like EIG or the marketing budget that GoDaddy entities had. However, over time, we stuck to what made us succeed in the first place, which was our attention to customer service. We know how saturated the hosting space is and there are a lot of companies out there whose service is not up to par with the customer’s expectations. InMotion Hosting was formed under the rule that customers come first, and over the years customers have spread the word about us allowing us to achieve our 15th year of operation, since our inception in 2001. So we think being an independent, employee owned and operated company is actually an advantage, as consumers these days don’t like being a customer of a publicly traded company whose goal is to appease their shareholders.
HostAdvice: What is behind your strategy to focus on Linux servers – why not also cater to a developer that prefers .Net and wants a Windows server?
Our decision to go with pure Linux servers had to do with stability and scalability. For the best hosting experience, we felt that Linux servers were the most stable platform for our customers. Since 2001, we know that .NET has come a long way and is much more stable than before, but we’ve been happy with the decision to be Linux specific over the years.
HostAdvice: What are the key trends you are seeing with website platforms like Joomla, Drupal, WordPress? Which is gaining momentum and which is losing speed, and why, in your opinion?
WordPress hosting (WP) is still the largest, but it’s losing some momentum to the website builders out there, as consumers really want an all in one solution. Hosting and WP are seen as pieces of the puzzle, and not the actual solution, so we’ve seen a decline in that CMS space. InMotion Hosting is trying to close that gap by creating a WP web builder that turns your WP install into a drag-and-drop builder; it’s called Boldgrid.com. That’s something we launched this year and already have thousands of customers on it building websites faster and more easily. Drupal is gaining more momentum on the Enterprise level and has a great foothold with .edu and large enterprise clients. This is based on conferences and word of mouth in the industry.
HostAdvice: You don’t offer cloud hosting. A. What are the advantages of using your VPS hosting vs cloud hosting? B. If someone insists on cloud hosting, which service would you recommend (AWS, Google, Azure, etc.)?
Actually, maybe this could be the first announcement for it, but we are close to launching a pure cloud product. We’ve listened to our customers and are creating the product as we speak. We just released the new Higher Availability VPS servers in February of 2016, which gives higher end platform tools to the masses on a VPS. We’re the first to do this just like we were the first to give free SSDs with our VPS. In the next couple months, we’ll be introducing a pure cloud product, so we’d tell customers to come to us in the near future.
HostAdvice: Where is your customer service located (US/outsourced) and what are the main benefits of that?
We are extremely proud to tell our customers that our support is not only 100% US based, but that they are our employees, trained by us and operates in our office; not a third party hired as a call center. Every single one of our employees is trained in-house and managed internally. No one is outsourced.
HostAdvice: You are ranked #1 for VPS hosting on HostAdvice, what do you do different to win this spot?
As mentioned earlier, we were the first ones to put free SSDs on VPS platforms. What we did was carefully do some marketing analyses and a customer survey to see what features would be the most needed. We listened and created a product in line with our customers’ needs. Since that revamp last year, we’ve kept ahead of the game, and are constantly updating the platform to get the people what they want. The Higher Availability is just one of those updates. And moving forward, we’ll have that cloud product as well to address everyone’s needs. We’ve managed to stay ahead by listening to what our customers want.
HostAdvice: What is your marketing strategy focusing on?
Product. We’ve lacked a product team internally for many years, but just a couple years ago we created a team specifically to figure out what the consumers want and aligned our products accordingly. One of the first projects for that team was that VPS revamp, and that was a huge success. So we are continuing with creating better and bigger products for our customer base to use.
HostAdvice: It has been 15 years since you started Inmotion Hosting. What would you do differently today, when looking back?
Use even better hardware. There was one time in the very beginning where we had tried to save a few dollars by going with a cheaper hardware vendor for some ‘comparable’ products. It crashed and set us back tremendously and our reputation was at stake. Since then, we have always used the top of the line Dell servers and parts. But if we could go back in time, we would never have gone with an alternate hardware solution for our customers. We will never make that mistake again and we’re happy we learned that lesson very early on.
HostAdvice: Some experts say web hosting is becoming a commodity, and the real cost of a shared hosting plan for the hosting company is just a few cents a year. What do you think of that and how can Inmotion differentiate itself from competition?
It would really depend on the quality of service. Sure, if you have a bare bone hosting platform, without any decent support, it can definitely come in that low. However, that is a different business model than ours. We pride on our customer service as the pillar to our success. And customer support is not cheap. So I’d argue which hosting company we’re being compared up against for that statement to hold true. For us, it’s definitely not a few cents per account. Our customer support was the main differentiator upon inception and continues to be so today.
HostAdvice: You put a lot of efforts into your SSDs offering. Why is this such a huge deal from the user standpoint?
Speed and responsiveness. To our customers, having SSDs means faster load times and faster responsiveness, which translates to faster web site completion times. To a business owner, where time is money, having a faster server could mean saving thousands of dollars. So having a platform that was faster than all the other competitors was a no-brainer from our perspective, and the customers were that much happier.
HostAdvice: In the past few years we see low quality “top 10 hosting” affiliate sites springing up like mushrooms after the rain. How is this affecting the industry and how do you deal with it?
The low quality top 10 sites won’t make it and they are not really a concern for us at this point. There are only a few quality top 10 sites on the web, such as hostadvice.com, and we’re already working with most of the influential ones. The ones that are springing up seem to come and go pretty quickly, so the ones that are left after the dust settles will be the only ones we work with. It isn’t really affecting the industry from our perspective, but from a new user perspective, some of those low quality top 10 sites can give the wrong information about the hosting company to the end user. The quality of information is a bit lacking on the less developed sites.
HostAdvice: If a giant web service company comes to you with a check, do you see yourself selling the company you established, and what would you do next?
There are no plans to sell out in the immediate future. InMotion Hosting has a long term vision that many other hosting companies lack(ed). With that focus, we have a strategy that will be played out for years to come.
HostAdvice: Anything else you want to tell HostAdvice users that they may not know about Inmotion Hosting?
Before you select a hosting company, make sure you look at more than just price and features.
See what type of company they are, public or private, and whether they are customer centric or if it’s more market share they are concerned with. Also ask others! Word of mouth is the strongest tool, so ask around for a recommendation on the platform you should be using if you’re not sure.
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